


Reunited

by Tayine



Series: Renegade Restrike [2]
Category: G.I. Joe: Renegades
Genre: Espionage, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:24:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the first mission of the Original Joes since the end of their ordeal, and it's just like old times: everything goes wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Shana “Scarlett” O’Hara of the G.I. Joes continued with her typing, pointedly ignoring the bickering she could hear going on behind her.  She had known it was going to be like this. If she was going to be completely honest with herself, she’d almost been looking forward to it. There was something to be said about spending a whole year in the cramped, metallic cab of a military truck with five other stubborn, wayward, loyal people such as her teammates. No one could spend that much time with other souls, watching their backs, bandaging their wounds, and vouching for their actions, and come out of it not caring about them. Not even a ninja, she thought briefly, amusing herself.

Snake Eyes had chosen not to join up with the unit known as the G.I. Joes when it had formed at the end of their ordeal, predictably, but now and again she caught glimpses of him on the field when Tunnel Rat, Roadblock, Ripcord, or even Duke had been deployed on missions. Not glimpses, she corrected herself, of course not. No ninja worth his salt would let himself be seen if he didn’t want to be. Rather, signs. Guards that the Joes hadn’t spotted right away were taken out by some unknown assailant. An alternative way into a barricaded building had become known to them by flashlight beams flickering behind the doorway after an explosion blocked their initial point of entry. Once, most noticeably, Tunnel Rat had been found at the edge of a safe-zone perimeter during a footstrike on a Cobra factory that had not yet been abandoned. He was sooty and unconscious but otherwise unharmed. Drag marks in the dirt leading from a door told a telltale story about how exactly he’d survived an ambush of Cobra operatives.

Of course, this was only when Scarlett herself was not on mission somewhere in the country. He didn’t leave her side unless it was absolutely necessary when she was out from the Pit, their base of operations in stark middle-of-nowhere Nevada. When she was on base, he was nowhere to be found, but the second she stepped out, be it to the cornfields of Kansas or the swamps of Louisiana, Snake Eyes was there, guarding her six. The other Joes had come to appreciate his extra protection, wary as they might be of the masked, silent vigilante. Sometimes they requested Scarlett to be on their away teams just because they knew Snake Eyes would be there too. Sometimes she went along with it. Sometimes she told the Joes to suck it up and do their jobs, regardless of who was in their unit. Every single man and woman who was a Joe could be counted on to do their job and do it well. They wouldn’t have been asked to join up if they couldn’t. A soldier didn’t request transfer into the G.I. Joe team. G.I. Joe requested them.

And yet, during these last six months, she’d sometimes catch herself reminiscing about the time she’d spent in the Coyote with her former team. It had been nice giving her own orders and traveling with no clear destination in sight. It had been like a college road trip with smelly, rowdy, overly-friendly frat boys, albeit frat boys who would have gladly died for her. She routinely monitored them all from the control room of the Pit when they were in the field while she wasn’t, and had managed to grab a bite with each of them once or twice in the mess, but she hadn’t snagged a mission with any of her Regular Joes since they’d freed her father from the M.A.S.S. device wormhole. She couldn’t help but wonder if that had been Duke’s intent as he and Flint assigned teams, or if they were just too different to be of any use together while on mission.

So this surprise, last-minute assignment had been as welcome as a breath of fresh air. They’d even commissioned the Coyote as their transport in a last hurrah. This was going to be an out-of-the-box deal, according to Duke, and what better environment to stir their improvisational juices than in the same vehicle that had been home to all their boneheaded, shoot-first decisions? They were the Original Joes, the individual team leaders of almost every unit that was formed, and this was going to be like a high school reunion.

Complete with drama.

“You couldn’t have showered? You have your own bathroom. You have your own dorm, with a shower and soap and a change of Army-issue pants and everything, right in the Pit.”

“I like _these_ pants. They’ve gotten me through some rough patches.”

“Are those pants going to stop me from murdering you? ‘Cause I’m going to murder you.”

“Can it, grunts. We’re coming up to the motel.” Scarlett stowed her pocket computer in her own (pressed, lightly creased, Army-to-the-core) pants and leaned forward over the thick dashboard of the vehicle.

Their cover was supposed to be a group of road-tripping young’uns, out to see the world. The town they were in, a bumfuck one-light hitching post in Wyoming, happened to be next door to a formerly-abandoned Cobra Pharmaceuticals plant that had suddenly and mysteriously woken up one morning a week before, scaring the residents with the unexpected sounds of medicine production. Since the absolving of the Springfield Five, Cobra as a company had become the world’s biggest pariah. No one in the country trusted the Cobra name anymore. It had hit the economy hard enough to scare the analysts at Wall Street. Citizens in some cities had taken it into their own hands, running the paramilitary employees of the company out of their towns, tails tucked firmly between their legs. The last six months had seen G.I. Joe acting like a maid service, cleaning up the last remnants of the stain of the company’s influence. America was fighting its first war on its own soil since the Civil War, and most people didn’t even know it. All they saw was the corporate espionage of a typical big-business-gone-bad type scandal. But Joes had died in the fight to discredit and banish Cobra, and the government took it personally.

Their mission here was to scope and report, possibly engage. They didn’t know why the plant had abruptly blinked into life, and they didn’t know who was behind it. The Baroness and Mindbender hadn’t been seen since the explosion of the M.A.S.S. device. Cobra Commander was presumed dead, lost to the sticky goo of his own creation.

“Home sweet home,” Duke muttered from his seat behind Scarlett as they pulled off the empty highway and into the parking lot of the mom-and-pop motel at which they were going to sleep.

“It’s better than bunking in the Coyote like in the good old days,” Scarlett reminded him. Good old days indeed. If she didn’t have nerve damage from sleeping on the cold, hard bunks in the back by the time she was forty, she would be a lucky girl indeed.

Roadblock maneuvered the two-ton truck up to the tiny office window and parked, gleefully running his hands over the steering wheel. He’d missed his girl. “Who’s paying?” he asked of his teammates, glancing around at them.

“The US government,” she said, slipping a credit card from somewhere in the many pockets of her flak vest. She unbuckled her seatbelt and hopped down from the truck, walking around the front of it to the office that was still open. She had to give the owners credit; it was past midnight, and yet they stayed open in case any passers-by would need to turn in for the night. It was equal parts hopeful and dedicated. She was sure she wouldn’t have been able to do it. But then again, she was a soldier born and bred. If she didn’t have a gun in her hands and orders to give, she would have been bored to death.

She walked into the well-lit office and smiled a genuine smile at the aging man behind the tall counter. It would be nice to get a good night’s sleep and wake ready for action in the morning. She liked not having stressful, looming deadlines, with the threat of death always minutes away. This was a passive assignment, the perfect one to get her toes wet with her old team. Duke’s decision for this reunion suddenly made more sense.

“Hi. I’d like to get two rooms, please, next door to each other if that’s possible,” she said, setting the credit card on the counter with a clack. She bustled in her pocket for the fake driver’s license that had been issued along with the card. “Two queens in each.”

“Where ya from?” drawled the man while he rang her up on a cash register that looked quite possibly older than he was. He barely glanced at the ID she offered.

“California,” she said, matching the state on the ID. “We’re going cross-country.”

“Stopped here, huh? Nice a ya. We don’t get much business nowadays.”

“Did you used to?” she asked, taking back the credit card he returned and watching his hands as they moved under the counter and came back up with a receipt.

“When our local Cobra plant was still legitimate,” he said tiredly. “We’d get lots of temporary employees coming and going. Big traveling job, I guess. Did you hear it started up again? Guess they’re trying to make a comeback. Good luck.”

“Good luck indeed,” Scarlett muttered darkly. The man watched her with a slightly glazed look. He was making conversation just to be polite. He posed no threat. She gave him the receipt she’d signed with some illegible scrawl and he turned around to the pegboard on the wall behind him with old-timey, actual metal numbered keys hanging from nails. There were twelve nails in total and only four keys still there. The others were empty.

“I can give you two rooms with two queens which aren’t next to each other, or two rooms next to each other with two queens in one and one queen in the other,” the man said, his Midwestern drawl beginning to make Scarlett drowsy. He talked slowly the way a cartoon turtle would talk.

The intelligence officer made a quick decision. Sticking together was smarter than being comfortable. “Two rooms next to each other is better. We have a group, we don’t like splitting up.”

“Rooms 4 and 5,” he said, lifting the keys, which jingled softly on their rings.

“You’re pretty full,” she observed, taking the keys from him.

“Oh yeah, happened overnight, right when Cobra opened up. Like I said, traveling jobs.” He seemed as disinterested in Cobra’s comings-and-goings as she would have been in running a motel.

“Well, thanks for this.” Scarlett turned away.

“Maid’s in at 2,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Diner opens at 5am.”

“Thanks.”

When she got back to the Coyote, she put her game face on. “The whole motel is crawling with Cobra operatives. When the plant started up, a whole bunch of employees came and took up the rooms here. We’re in enemy territory, guys. Remember that.”

They parked in a spot right in front of their first-floor rooms, Roadblock somehow managing to park the behemoth of a truck in a dead straight line. They all climbed out, each holding a piece of luggage that was as mismatched as they were. They didn’t look like soldiers.

“Bad news. Two rooms, only three beds,” Scarlett said, unlocking the door to 4 and pushing it open, inviting the men inside first. Tunnel Rat was last in. She handed him the key.

“Nice,” Roadblock said, taking in the tacky 70’s wallpaper and matching carpet. “Looks just like my Uncle Roy’s house.”

Ripcord tested the mattress of the bed closest to the door. “Comfy for a roach motel.”

Duke dropped his rucksack on the table near the bathroom door, watching suspiciously as Scarlett continued to stand in the doorway. “Why aren’t you coming in?”

“’Cause my room’s next door,” she said cheerfully, hiking her backpack up on her shoulder and dangling the key to 5 from her pointer finger. “I just want to watch you guys do bed assignments.”

“Scarlett gets a room all to herself?” Tunnel Rat asked in disbelief from his place where he’d camped on the far bed, his dirty boots on the garish bedspread.

“Course she does,” Ripcord groaned. “Didn’t you see that coming?”

“Ranking officer, team leader, and I did all the hard work,” she said, ticking off the points on her fingers. “Who do you think got us this intel?”

“We didn’t want you sleepin’ with us anyway,” Tunnel Rat quipped, then turned a shade of tomato red before ducking his head down.

Scarlett sensed Snake Eyes before the rest of them did and didn’t flinch when he dropped down from his perch on the roof over the open corridor. She looked over at him and quirked an eyebrow. He shook his head.

“I’m never going to get used to that,” Ripcord sighed, rubbing his chest.

“Where’s Snake going to sleep?” asked Tunnel Rat suddenly, recovered from his embarrassment. “There’s only room for four in here.”

“He can bunk with me,” Scarlett said. A heavy silence hung in the air for a moment. “Anyone got a problem with that?” she thundered, crossing her arms.

“No, ma’am,” Duke said in his best soldier voice. Roadblock shook his head, looking like he couldn’t care less. He had the TV remote in his hand and was already spread on the closer bed.

“All I’m sayin’ is, I’m not sharing with Ripcord,” Tunnel Rat said, breaking the tension.

“Like I’d want to bunk with you!” Ripcord burst out, rounding on him.

Duke and Roadblock exchanged huffy looks, each daring the other to be the bigger man. There was a brief tussle of micro-expressions, wherein Duke asserted his authority as ranking officer and Roadblock called out the sergeant’s bravery, before the blonde man rolled his eyes and took a half step forward. “Fine. But you’re showering before you’re getting anywhere near the bed.”

“It never helps anyway,” Ripcord smirked _sotto voce._

“Rise and shine oh seven hundred,” Scarlett commanded. “Good night.” She closed the door behind her and went to 5, unlocking it and opening the door wide. She stepped in and turned on the light. It was smaller than the guys’ room, only big enough to hold one queen-sized bed and a small table and chair combo, plus the Formica dresser with an old TV standing precariously on top. She noticed a door on the left hand wall that appeared to lead into the room next door. The first thing she did after dropping her backpack on the bed was to make sure that door was locked.

Snake Eyes came into the room and closed the door behind him. Scarlett looked round at him. “Is this alright? I assumed you’d rather not have to share with those grunts.”

He nodded.

“Okay, good. I’m going to take a shower.”

Scarlett emerged fifteen minutes later, her Irish skin pink from the hot water. She’d brought her clothes into the bathroom and was already wearing a baggy shirt and boxers, her version of pajamas. Snake Eyes was sitting at the table, clicking on her pocket computer.

“What do you have?” She leaned over his shoulder to see the screen, rubbing her hair with a cheap white towel from the bathroom.

He tapped it once and an internet browser came up. It was an article from an online news source, dated four years old. ‘Cobra Hints at Breakthroughs’ read the header. Scarlett tried to read it but her eyes slid out of focus the harder she concentrated. “Wow, I’m more tired than I thought. Is it dire or can I read it tomorrow?”

Snake Eyes raised a hand and waved it over the screen before pressing a button, blackening the device. He set it on the table and stood.

She hesitated. “You’re going to share the bed with me, right? You’re not going to play it cool and meditate on the floor all night? ‘Cause I know you, Snake, and even you need real sleep every week or so.”

It took a moment, but finally he nodded. He was looking straight at her through the mask. She could feel his eyes.

“I’ll turn off the light. Just don’t… just don’t be uncomfortable. We’re… we’re not strangers.”

This time he didn’t react. Scarlett went around the bed and turned off the switch near the door, throwing the room into almost complete darkness with the light-blocking curtains on the window. She checked the locks on the door and the window beside it and then felt her way back to the bed. She pulled down the cheap bedspread and the one blanket, the kind that all motels have, with the strange kind of fuzz that somehow reminds of Grandma’s house. Last came the sheet, a 100-thread-count monster that had seen more sweaty bodies than an urban dance hall. She rustled for a moment, getting comfortable, and then stilled self-consciously, waiting to hear some sound cues.

Of course, none came. One moment she was alone and the next, a body was sliding in next to her, a body, she realized with a jolt as a leg brushed against hers, that was not wearing thermals or ninja spandex. She rolled over onto her other side, now facing where Snake Eyes was, trying to will herself night-vision. She could feel warmth coming from his side and hear the oh-so-soft sound of his gentle, steady breathing.

Without knowing why, or even thinking about it, she reached out and touched where she assumed his chest was. It flinched a little under her fingertips and she pulled her hand away.

“Good night, Snake Eyes.”

Scarlett closed her eyes, all the better to utilize her other senses. For a split second, as she was drifting off into almost-immediate sleep, she thought she heard a blip in his breathing pattern, like he was responding with his soundless voice.


	2. Chapter 2

Conrad “Duke” Hauser of the G.I. Joes woke automatically, like he was a computer blinking on. He stared up at the ceiling of the motel room, seeing half-repaired cracks spackled over with an unprofessional hand in the dawn’s soft light.

He’d slept mechanically, not dreaming, no tossing or turning. Even Tunnel Rat’s enthusiastic arm and leg spasms that normally kept him awake had not disturbed him. As far as a bunkmate, he could honestly do worse. Once, on a mission, he’d had to share campfire space with Flint. The softest part of the ground beside their fire pit had only been big enough for one man in a sleeping bag. Neither of them had gotten through the night unscathed.

He sat up when he realized the sound he was hearing was the shower going. Ripcord was gone from his spot on the other bed. Roadblock had taken up the entire mattress since his departure, spread-eagled and drooling. His snores were concussive.

Or maybe he’d been like that the whole time, and Rip had slept on the floor.

Duke whacked his bedmate on the chest as he got out from under the blanket, saying, “Rise and shine, ladies. It’s snake-killing time.”

Tunnel Rat coughed and cursed, rubbing his eyes, rolling over onto his stomach and curling into a ball to avoid any more blows. “Five more minutes,” he slurred.

“Now.”

Roadblock snorted awake. “Are we under attack?”

“Attack from an angry sergeant if you don’t get up and showered right now,” Duke said, going to the bathroom door and knocking.

“Yeah?” came Ripcord’s voice through the hiss of running water.

“Hurry it up.”

“Yessir.”

Tunnel Rat was stretching, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I wonder what Scarlett and the ninja got up to last night,” he said, glancing at the door that led to their teammates’ room.

Duke bristled, digging through his rucksack for his soap. His combat gear was set on the table in military order, waiting to be strapped on.

Ripcord stepped out of the bathroom in a rush of steam, a towel around his waist. “Dude didn’t exactly put up a fight to bunk with her.”

“What they get up to is none of our business,” Roadblock said diplomatically.

“Just sayin’,” Tunnel Rat said, standing. “It doesn’t exactly put him in combat mode.”

Ripcord began to dress, pulling his improvised uniform from his sack underneath the window. “I’m sure Snake can slice and dice even after a night of red hot love, if you know what I mean.”

“The walls are pretty thin. I’m betting nothing happened, we mighta heard-.”

“That’s enough, Private Lee, Private Weems.” Duke drew himself up to his full height. Rank-and-naming was the Joes version of a stern parent middle-naming their child. Codenames were usually good enough for them. Tunnel Rat cowed, staring at Duke. “That is your superior officer. Show her the respect she’s earned.”

Tunnel Rat blushed again, averting his eyes like a shamed dog. “You’re right, Duke. I’m sorry.”

Duke turned to Ripcord to chew him out too, but the PFC was standing, fully-geared, with his hands up, palms flat. “I’m not going to say a word. Promise.”

It wasn’t as much of an apology as he would have liked, but it was close enough. He nodded to them and then stepped into the bathroom. When he came out and Roadblock went it, the clock said 7:15. He slipped on his pants, went to the door that they shared with Scarlett’s room, and knocked. There was no answer and no sounds beyond the wood.

Ripcord and Tunnel Rat caught on. They stood from their places on the beds. “She might be in the shower,” offered Ripcord.

“Snake Eyes would open the door,” Duke said, trying the knob. It was locked. “T Rat, get Roadblock. Rip, with me.”

‘Rise and shine at 7,’ she’d said, and to Scarlett, rise and shine at 7 meant being mission-ready at 7, not waking up to the peaceful sound of birdsong and taking a long, luxurious shower at 7. She was late. Tardiness was a crime punishable by death to their dear intelligence officer.

Together, Duke and Ripcord walked out of their room and gave the landscape a quick once-over, checking for any obvious signs of trouble. The Coyote was still parked in the spot in front of their rooms, looking untouched. The door to 5 was closed and there were no signs that anything was amiss, no broken lock or splintered wood. Duke looked to Rip and made concerned eye contact, both of them thinking that whatever had happened, it wasn’t good.

The private walked backwards, keeping himself facing the open countryside of the small Wyoming town while the sergeant stood guard, wishing he had his blaster. Ripcord banged on the door with the bottom of his gloved fist. “Scarlett! Snake!”

“Nothing,” Duke said.

“Nothing. Should we call post?”

“Not yet. Let’s wait until we’re absolutely sure they’re missing. They could be out getting donuts or something.”

“Snake Eyes isn’t the kind of guy to just walk into a café, Duke.”

“I was spitballing,” growled the sergeant, bristling. Sometimes the real-world practicality of their flight specialist was off-putting, useful, or sensible. Other times it was just plain annoying.

Roadblock and Tunnel Rat joined them outside. “Anything?” asked Roadblock hopefully, ever the optimist. His short hair was sparkling with water droplets.

“This has officially become a search-and-rescue,” said Duke, standing straight and assuming squad leadership with just a few words and a carefully manicured tone. He faced his troops. “We don’t know where two of our men are. We’re deep in enemy territory. Let’s find them and get the hell out. The former mission is scrubbed until we regroup.”

“Are we calling post?” Tunnel Rat asked.

Ripcord started to shake his head and speak, but Duke thought over his split-second reasoning from the minute before and changed his mind. “Yeah, we are. Ripcord, you handle that from the Coyote. T Rat, get us into their room.”

Tunnel Rat dug into one of his deep trouser pockets and pulled out two specialized metallic instruments, immediately setting to work on the lock. “Thank god for mom-and-pop places with real keys, huh?”

 “What are you doing?”

All four men turned. Scarlett was standing beside the passenger door of the Coyote, a big pink pastry box in her arms. Snake Eyes stood close behind her, a paper tray of five coffees in one hand.

“What the _hell_?” shouted Duke, going from zero to sixty. “Where have you been? You were MIA, we thought you guys were kidnapped.”

Scarlett’s eyes blazed with anger from being yelled at, but she seemed to fight that down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would immediately jump to that conclusion. We were going to be back before you guys would be up, but there was a little incident outside the bakery.”

“What happened?” asked Roadblock, stepping forward and interrupting Duke’s retort.

“Two Cobra employees started an argument with the cashier about the price of their bear claws. They were being loud and rude and had to be escorted out. I didn’t want to give myself away, but I almost jumped in and did it myself. So it took longer than we thought it would.”

Snake Eyes raised a fist to his chest and made a short circular motion. Scarlett translated, “Sorry,” saying it for herself as well.

“Those’re donuts?” asked Tunnel Rat, peeking around at the box she was holding.

“Regular and jelly-filled,” replied Scarlett, pleased.

Duke breathed a little heavily, his heart still pounding and excess adrenaline poisoning his veins. It wasn’t like Scarlett to be so flippant. She took missions more seriously than even he did; it was something that kept their group focused and them working so well together. He’d noticed her attitude was strange the afternoon before, when they’d first grouped up outside the Pit. She seemed… perky.

Ripcord looked at the sergeant and smirked at him, pointing and muttering, “Look, man. Donuts.” Duke composed himself, rolled his eyes, and managed a smile. Of course they were.

They all got into the Coyote to eat and drink, getting fuel for what would probably turn into a long day ahead. Duke and Snake Eyes sat in back, Duke silently munching through a cream-filled donut and too-sweet coffee while listening to Scarlett and Tunnel Rat argue about the best way to infiltrate the plant. Snake Eyes was as stoic as ever, though Duke could see small movements as Snake turned his head back and forth, volleying through the verbal blows that T Rat and Scarlett exchanged. Ripcord and Roadblock concentrated on their breakfast, greedily licking their fingers and joking quietly about their teammates.

“All’s I’m sayin’ is, the sewers are sure not to have cameras,” Tunnel Rat said, gesticulating and almost spilling jelly on Ripcord’s pants next to him. “We can get in, get out real quick and we won’t risk being seen.”

“I’m not crawling through sewers if I don’t have to,” Scarlett said.

“I’m saying we have to,” grunted Tunnel Rat, crossing his arms over his chest and taking a bite from his donut as it hung from his fingers near his elbow.

“Is anyone else with me on this?” Scarlett demanded, turning in her seat to include the rest of the team. “Going down through the roof is just as good as going up from the ground. Snake Eyes can clear the way, Roadblock will have the Coyote ready to go, and we can do some quick recon in teams.”

“I don’t mind being getaway driver, but Cobra won’t let me just park out in the middle of the plaza next to the decorative fountain,” Roadblock said. “So I’d have to stash the truck somewhere far and you guys would have to make a run for it if shit went down.”

“Duke,” Scarlett implored, “tell them.”

Duke took a breath, all eyes on him. He liked being team leader – something that made him good at doing it – but sometimes it was just a pain. “I say sewers, Scarlett.”

Scarlett stared at him a moment while T Rat whooped and Ripcord groaned. Then she turned away, hiding her face from them. “Fine,” she said. And it wasn’t said unkindly.

Duke exchanged bewildered looks with Roadblock, who seemed stunned into silence. There was no way regular Scarlett would let herself lose so easily.

“Alright,” he said, standing and going to the doorway between the cab and the back. “Who are you and what have you done with Lieutenant O’Hara?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been acting different. I’m damn sure the Scarlett I know wouldn’t let herself get behind on a schedule, buy the rest of us doughnuts, and then back down from an argument. So what is it? Imposter? Brain implant?”

Ripcord snickered and leaned forward in his seat, squeezing the headrest behind Scarlett.

“Shut up, grunt,” Scarlett said, crossing her arms in front of her and turning towards the windshield.

“She’s smiling,” Roadblock gasped from the driver’s seat. “Guys, she’s smiling! She can’t even insult us properly!”

Scarlett laughed and covered her mouth hurriedly while the rest of the group exploded into jeering taunts and laughter. Teasing and name-calling volleyed through the cab of the Coyote, each man overjoyed. It seemed to be finally hitting them all: they were back together. There were lots of shoulder-slaps and high-fives, and when Scarlett rolled her eyes and joined in with her palm held aloft, a huge smile making her face shine, fresh cheers came from all of them.

Duke finally went to sit in the back again after they had calmed down, unable to put on his soldier face. “I hope you’re smiling,” he grinned to Snake Eyes across from him. “We’re all happy to have you. I hope you know that.”

It took a second, like this was being processed, but Snake nodded finally, and shook the hand that Duke offered across the empty space between their benches.

When Roadblock started the Coyote and backed her out of the parking space, the entire team was giddy with the adrenaline and excitement of the mission ahead. It was just like old times.


	3. Chapter 3

Nicky “Tunnel Rat” Lee of the G.I. Joes jumped down from the cab of the Coyote and straightened his lucky pants. Around him, his teammates were adjusting their packs, doing weapons and supplies checks, just milling about. No one seemed to want to make the first move towards the open grate of the sewer line in front of their parked vehicle. The entrance to the pipe gaped open like the mouth of a monster, belching dank, hot air that smelled less than rosy.

The building loomed from the dry plains like a haunted high school. It was five stories tall, practically a sky-scraper among the typical Wyoming town skyline, and was straight and boxy with the boring lines of a factory. It was built with tan brick and concrete that was crumbling in many places. Most of the plain glass windows were broken or boarded up. They had parked beside the mouth of the pipe system that opened up into a gulley half a klick from the actual structure, among the dead foliage and half-assed landscaping some contractor had probably put in as an afterthought. The front plaza of the building had been deserted; there even was a fountain, much to Roadblock’s amusement, but it was stone-dry. They had driven the Coyote past it in Cobra colors, just in case, painted on by the holographic mode as soon as they had left the tiny town and driven out to the rural plains in which the building had been erected. No one had shot at them or tried to blow them up, but they were still cautious. If anyone was watching, they hadn’t made a move yet, putting the Joes on high-alert.

"No time like the present,” Tunnel Rat said aloud finally as he took the first step forwards. The rest of them fell into line behind him, and T Rat felt a rush of affection for his adopted family. When it came to it, every one of the Joes would do their duty and do it well. He had never trusted people so completely before, except maybe his brother, and it felt good to have them watching his six.

This camaraderie didn’t stop the near-constant flow of bitching, however.

Ripcord was the worst, followed by Roadblock chiming in when he cracked his head against a low pipe or stepped in a pile of muck that couldn’t hold his weight, making him sink to his knees. The water that flowed from the pipes was mostly pure, but it was warm and bacteria-ridden. They weren’t in a sewer, but an overflow pipe installed in case of flooding, and though the place wasn’t as disgusting as the Brooklyn shit pipes they’d had to crawl around while chasing Mindbender, it was close.

Scarlett, however, was still the strangest thing about the mission. She was tapping on her pocket computer, in the middle of the group alongside Duke, leading them in generally the right direction. They wanted to spy more than engage on this mission, so they were going in with guns holstered, so to speak – he glanced at his blaster and checked for the tenth time that it was fully charged – but none of them were discounting the chance that they were headed into very real danger.

“The left one of the fork,” Scarlett said. Her voice echoed a bit in the damp air. The light from the tunnel opening was fading, making it harder and harder to see. So far, their tunnel had been a straightaway, but they were coming up to a dark tunnel with two smaller, thinner pipes branching off.

“Where will that lead us?” T Rat asked. He wasn’t questioning her decisions, but he wanted to know where she was taking them even as he obeyed her orders and veered left.

“We’re trying to find the top floor of the hidden lab. According to this, there are three basement levels beneath the main building. You know how much Cobra likes basements.”

The group sniggered in unison. Their most dangerous and exciting battles had all been conducted underground.

They walked for a while in silence except for the sloshing of their boots in the water. The tunnel they had picked was thin, so that they had to go one by one. It was barely wide enough for Roadblock’s shoulders and just tall enough for his height, but he stopped complaining once the water levels dropped and his socks stopped getting wet. Tunnel Rat led the group, taking Scarlett’s directional orders from right behind him on the sparse twists and turns they had to take. All too soon it was pitch black and lit only by the small square of electronic shine coming from her pocket comp.

“Flashlights,” he said, taking his out. He heard the shuffling of the rest of them following his lead, and then the tunnel was filled with light once again. The walls of the tunnel were damp and covered in mossy patches; he reached out to touch it, feeling its springiness beneath his fingertips.

“There’re no security devices until we get to the first level of the underground,” Scarlett said, reading her blueprints they’d downloaded off Cobra’s mainframe with Breaker’s help back at the Pit. She hadn’t put up a second fight to go in through the building itself, and Breaker had managed to find the information they needed with only a few clicks of a mouse and then sent it wirelessly to Scarlett’s computer. “There’ll be openings from these sewers into the floor drains that will be just big enough for Tunnel Rat to wiggle through to recon. If there’s no one there, we can find a way to get into the room to see what’s going on.”

“And if there is someone in the room?”

“Then we’ll probably go in anyway.”

He heard the cocky smile in her tone and wanted to both hoot at her bravery and gripe at her recklessness.

“So tell me why this particular factory,” said Ripcord near the back of the group. His voice echoed a bit as the sound bounced off Roadblock and back up the tunnel. In the darkness, the sudden sound of voices was eerie.

“Watch the angle here,” said Tunnel Rat at the front. There was a slight but sudden decline in the pipe; water trickled down it in a thin stream, and there were no handholds to speak of on the mossy walls in case one slipped.

“Because,” grunted Duke behind Scarlett, who seemed to be having trouble with his boots getting a grip, “This is the first time a Cobra plant reactivated since the sieges began. All the others that are still being cleaned out by GI Joe are holdovers from the good ol’ days.”

“No, I meant, why this plant? Why choose this one to reactivate?”

“That’s what we need to find out.”

“It could be the rural setting,” said Scarlett. “Cobra likes being out of the way.”

“But this one’s small compared to the others. Either they didn’t have enough resources to start up others, or this one is hiding something. It’s such a run-down plant, remember how it looked from the outside?”

“Maybe it’s the only one they could get to.”

“Yeah, Rip, most of the Cobra plants are held by GI Joe right now.”

“No, he’s right,” said Roadblock. “There’s another factor here. There’s something special about this particular one.”

“Like what?” asked Scarlett musingly, asking the question to the general air instead of challenging him.

“Maybe a new weapon. Maybe a different kind of Viper. Maybe a stash or secret- something, I dunno.”

“Good thinking, guys. We have to expect the unexpected here.”

The pipe rumbled suddenly, making them all cry out. Tunnel Rat heard a spitting swear and then the squeak of rubber-soled boots against wet cast iron. He braced himself, both hands against the pipe walls, feet planted firmly, but the weight of Duke falling into Scarlett, who in turn fell into Tunnel Rat, was too much to bear. They slid down the sloping, curved floor of the pipe on some grotesque kiddie ride. Limbs entangled. Flesh bruised. They landed in a yarn ball of wet, grumpy solider at the end of the slope, coming out into a much wider pipe. There was a layer of standing water half a foot deep in this one. Calls echoed down from above.

“You guys all right?”

“Peachy,” Scarlett grumbled, her chin pinned to her chest by Duke’s knee on her head.

“We’re fine,” Duke called back up. “It opens up down here, throw us your lights and come down.”

Flashlights clattered down and splashed into the water, making it glow with a murky green shine. Tunnel Rat stood and wrung out his pants, which were soaked, and looked for his own flashlight. Only Duke and he had been carrying one of the three of them, and both were now off and missing. Scarlett clicked on her computer, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen. “This isn’t right,” she muttered to herself.

There was a long whine of rubber on iron again and Snake Eyes appeared, as graceful and agile as a cat landing on its paws. He touched Scarlett’s shoulder and she showed him the computer while Tunnel Rat and Duke scoured the water in the pipe for the flashlights. Ripcord came soon after, unable to contain a whoop as he surfed down the pipe’s slope with his arms out like he was in Hawaii.

Tunnel Rat located his flashlight just as Roadblock managed to squeeze out into the larger pipe. He picked it up and wiped away the moisture, knowing it would be fine as long as nothing internal had been smashed. These were military-issue and able to sustain most hard wear and tear, but he couldn’t be certain.

“Thank god,” said Roadblock in his easy drawl, looking around the pipe. This one was several inches above his head rather than the one or two of the last one, and wide enough for them all to stand at attention in a line. “Where are we, Scarlett?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Duke made a cry of discovery and snatched at his flashlight under the water like he was trying to catch a fish with his hands. “What do you mean, ‘don’t know’?” he demanded as he straightened.

“I don’t know this place. The pipe behind us was supposed to lead us to the first subterranean floor in a pipe structure that kind of looks like a pound-sign shape. See, four drains in the floor of the basement level above our heads, each connected by this pound-symbol of pipe.”

All five of them looked and saw the structure she indicated, as plain as could be in its computer generated glory. They could see the path they’d taken outlined in the 3D environment of the hi-tech blueprints Breaker had translated from code off Cobra’s internal systems, marked clearly by the straight and narrow pipe that led back to the outside. There were only two entrances to the network of pipes they stood in, opposite of each other and stretching out from the building. The pound-symbol structure was marked in light blue just beneath the floor of the square basement level marked in a darker navy.

“So… crap,” Tunnel Rat said to the silent, dark air around them. “We’re lost.”

“We’re not _lost_ ,” said Scarlett with irritation that he recognized as masked fear. “They’ve just changed the system. And the plan. We can still recon.”

“We’re going in with so much less information,” Duke said.

“We did that all the time,” grinned Ripcord. “I can’t even count how many times there was no _plan_ , and we just did it anyway.”

“You weren’t there half of those times!” cried Tunnel Rat.

“Guys,” Roadblock murmured.

They quieted, spooked by the seriousness in his voice, and listened. There was a low grumbling coming from all sides, sounding like rushing water or the hum of an earthquake.

“No chance at all it’s just thunder, is there,” Tunnel Rat deadpanned.

As if summoned by an ancient god of chaos and pratfalls, the thing they all knew was coming rose from the water like it had been a part of it, looming nine feet tall and four feet wide, the largest version they had ever seen. This Bio-Viper was a murky gray, almost boring in its coloring compared to its more decorative cousins, and had the same jewel-red markings on its face that indicated the hard drive and sensors, a Bio-Viper version of a brain and eyes. It raised its fists above its head and screamed, the mouth parts opening sideways in the uncanny and gross imitation of a spider that Tunnel Rat had long ago learned to hate.

“It’s couldn’t just be easy, for _once_ ,” he shouted as he tuck and rolled sideways to avoid the blow the Viper threw. He heard his teammates shouting and splashing through the knee-deep water as they too made motions to escape, and he thanked god that this encounter was happening in this pipe instead of the one above it, where they would have been sitting ducks, picked off in a straight line.

“Open fire!” Duke shouted, wielding his blaster and letting loose with five quick pulses. They illuminated his body in a grotesque flash of white light, pow pow pow pow pow, then hit the Viper and glanced off sideways towards them, ricocheting wildly. All six Joes ducked and cried out angrily.

“Don’t open fire!” Duke shouted. “Snake Eyes!”

The ninja responded fluidly, bouncing towards the monster with his katana flashing in the sporadic flashlight beams that were in the hands of Ripcord and Tunnel Rat as they tried to give him a target in the pitch darkness. They heard the blades cutting through the air and the screams of the Viper as it was cut. Tunnel Rat hung back with the rest, holding his light steady on the monster. Snake Eyes slashed and dipped and slashed again, cutting the thing into ribbons, but the gelatinous goop they were used to had obviously been upgraded. His katana did the damage, sure, but the thing’s skin healed too quickly for there to be any lasting impact. They would have to get creative. As always.

The Viper dodged one last cut and managed to get a hand around Snake’s middle, pinning his arms. He raised the ninja into the air and roared at him before throwing him clear across the room, back at the other Joes. They all cried out, but there was too much craziness for Tunnel Rat to see where he’d landed, because he was already running towards the thing.

“Covering fire!” he shouted.

“Tunn-“

“Just do it!” he screamed. Above his head, the white bursts of plasma lit the room and struck the monster, who yowled like the blasts hurt even as they bounced off into the walls, striking the iron and making it glow fire-red. Tunnel Rat was small and quick; he was on top of the thing even before it could notice. He climbed up its softy, silly-putty back easily, creating hand- and foot-holds, and straddled the thing's shoulders.

“Alright, Tiny, just a bit of surgery, won’t hurt a bit,” he said to himself as he pulled out his knife and plunged it into the Viper’s head. The skin parted like butter but almost immediately began to stitch together, and now the thing knew he was there. It flailed and shook, raising its hands to try and pry him off.

“Distract him!” he shouted at his teammates.

They let loose with blaster fire once more, aimed at the monster’s feet and legs, making it totter and jump. Tunnel Rat squeezed his thighs around its neck and went back to work cutting into its head, sticking his fingers down deep. From one pocket of his pants he produced a specialized flash-bang, an ordinary grenade until you looked closer; this one was one of his favorite toys, developed deep within the US Army’s R&D and not even released to the troops yet. He’d managed to get his hands on one while test-driving them with Heavy Duty. With one hand, he forced the flash-bang into the incision he’d made and was met with resistance, like the monster’s flesh was rejecting it. “Fuck,” he spat, and pulled out the tiny transmitter that would activate the grenade. Well, if he died, at least he died taking down the freakazoid even Snake Eyes couldn’t. That had to count for something. “Threetwoone ahh!”

He pressed the button and the whole pipe lit up with the piercing light of magnesium, blinding each of them, and then a millisecond later he felt the shock of the blast. He was thrown flat on his back in the water several feet from where he’d been moments ago. The Bio-Viper shrieked and flailed, its head half-gone and oozing melted sludge, and it turned to him and ran like it was going to trample him into the muck. Then another blast halted its pursuit of revenge, this one twice as big so that the whole pipe shook and reverberated with the force.

Tunnel Rat lifted his head blearily. The Bio-Viper’s head and upper torso were gone, decimated by the second explosion. The corpse tipped sideways and collapsed into the water.

“Everyone all right?” he called weakly.

His teammates rushed at him, except for Scarlett who was probably tending to Snake Eyes, whatever happened to him. He was hoisted to his feet and checked bodily for injury, hands patting his head and shoulders and stomach.

“That was amazing,” Duke said, squeezing one hand around T Rat’s deltoid.

“Good job on the vermin, Rat,” Ripcord said, and the two of them shared sardonic grins.

“How’s Snake Eyes?” he called past them to the dark corner where he presumed Scarlett and the ninja were.

“Tore his leg up pretty badly,” Duke said softly.

Tunnel Rat pushed past them and went to check, feeling his way by sense. Rats can see well in the dark, he thought to himself. He walked until he kicked something, then knelt and used his hands. “Light!”

The rest of them followed, Roadblock supplying his flashlight, the last one they had. Ripcord and Duke set to searching again, sloshing carefully through the water and hoping their feet would find them submerged somewhere.

The ninja was sitting up, one leg pulled up at a ninety-degree angle, his calf being held aloft by Scarlett. She was wrapping a long strip of torn cloth around the meaty part of his calf, pressing tightly. Her face was pale in the light.

“How deep was it?” Tunnel Rat asked her, as if the ninja weren’t there. That’s how they’d evolved around him, and everyone in the team knew it wasn’t meant to be rude. Only Scarlett knew the ins and outs of the mysterious member of their team, and it saved time to just ask her to translate.

“Deep,” she said in an ugly voice. “Bleeding hard. He won’t be able to walk on it.” She looked at him as she said this, as if she knew he would challenge this sentiment.

“Guys, I’m trying the radio and it’s not working. Can anyone get a signal?” Ripcord asked beyond the gloom. The rest of them immediately went to the satellite transmitters on their hips, supplied to every Joe and able to get a signal anywhere in the world- except, apparently, from here.

“This is getting to be too much,” Tunnel Rat sighed. “ _Of course_ they would have a frequency scrambler, how did we not see that coming?”

“Should we retreat?” asked Roadblock.

“Not back up the pipe,” Scarlett said, still kneeling and holding Snake’s leg up, balancing his ankle on her shoulder, trying her own transmitter with one hand. “I’m willing to bet a million bucks it was designed to be one-way only, too steep and slippery to climb back up.”

“Well whoop-de-fucking-do Scarlett, thanks for telling us.”

“ _I_ wanted to go down the roof, remember?” she said silkily.

“Onwards and upwards, then,” Duke said. “Snake Eyes, we’ll carry you.”

The ninja shook his head and made to stand up, but both Tunnel Rat and Scarlett stopped him with their hands, making protesting and vaguely threatening noises.

“Easily,” Tunnel Rat instructed, helping him up with Scarlett beside him. “I’m sitting in something warm, and I’m pretty sure it’s blood, not piss. Not sure which is worse.”

The team gathered their bearings, Snake Eyes hovering between Scarlett and Tunnel Rat with his arms around their shoulders. Roadblock took the lead this time, holding the last remaining flashlight.

As suddenly as anything else that day, the pipe was flooded with light, making them all cry out and flinch, their hands covering their eyes. There was a loud pop and then a hissing noise.

“What _now_ ,” Ripcord muttered.

The lights, wherever they were, shut off as quickly as they’d come, and the hissing noise died down too. They recovered their vision slowly, sparks fizzing beneath their eyelids. Roadblock lifted his flashlight beam to the ceiling, trying to find the source of the light. Small industrial bulbs hung in the center of the rounded top, almost imperceptible unless you knew what to look for.

“So they definitely know we’re here, then,” Duke said wearily.

“Like the Viper didn’t tip you off, huh?” Ripcord said.

Tunnel Rat had wanted to say the same thing, but he was currently distracted. A strange tingle was spreading across his skin, down from his scalp all the way to his toes. He shivered once, banishing the heat flash that had followed the uncomfortable prickle. “Did anyone else feel that?” he asked.

“What?”

“I did.”

That was Duke.

“I didn’t,” offered Ripcord.

Scarlett and Roadblock also offered a negative reply, but Snake Eyes beside him was nodding, jerking his head so that Tunnel Rat could feel it.

“Okay, that was the weirdest thing ever. It felt like-.”

“Like pee shivers.”

“Yeah!”

Scarlett made a noise in her throat and nudged them on. “Whatever it was, we can think about it as we move. We need a find a way out.”

The group turned towards the way they had yet to go and began walking. Tunnel Rat vowed briefly to invest in some sort of waterproof boots the next time he was on land and hoped to hell that there weren’t many more surprises in store for them, if only for the fact that he wanted to get back to dry land quick. He had never wanted to escape from a pipe so badly before and resented the fact that Cobra was making him feel uncomfortable in his own domain. Just another offence to add to the list, of course.


	4. Chapter 4

Scarlett walked slowly, weighed down both by Snake Eyes and the worry that had been gnawing at her gut for almost the entire mission. There were mysteries upon secrets upon enigmas here, and she wasn’t so inclined to go into the situation without knowing as much as she could. It was obvious that the building was at least manned, as someone had sent the Bio-Viper after them, and it was obvious that they were in deeper shit than they’d anticipated when they’d planned the mission back at the Pit, but it was completely unknown how the situation was going to play out. Scarlett was an intelligence officer. Knowing was more than half of the battle for her. She hated, hated, _hated_ not knowing.

She and the rest of the awkward trio of Snake and T Rat came up last in the sorry procession this time. Roadblock was leading, holding his light and swinging it back and forth, though that did little for the people behind them who couldn’t see past his massive frame. He was a sure leader, though, whispering back warnings if he came to an extra-slippery part of the mucky pipe. They walked for at least five minutes without another incident.

“We must be coming up to the opposite entrance by now,” Scarlett said eventually. They had to have passed underneath the building already and were making their way back to the gulley entrance that provided overflow on the far end of the property, half a klick past the Cobra structure and a full half mile from where they’d started.

“Think it’s up an incline like the other one?” Roadblock asked.

“Probably, but at least it’s something to try.”

“The mission’s scrubbed for sure,” he grunted. He had probably been as excited to reunite with his original teammates as she was.

“I say we call post as soon as we get a connection and just blow the whole place up,”  
Ripcord said.

“Tough talk, soldier, but not even you are that bloodthirsty,” Scarlett said.

“Yesterday I would have agreed with you, but now…”

They went silent again, ears straining to hear past the slushing of the water around their ankles and the heavy breathing from their comrades.

She regretted forcing the mission now. It had been her intel that had created this journey out from the Pit. When it came to Cobra, she was ruthless, and had spent most of her downtime at Joe HQ doing research on the parts of the company that they hadn’t yet dismantled, unlike most of her peers who trained and relaxed while off-duty. She had gone to the control room to present her findings and had found Duke there. She had mentioned wanting a new outing with the Originals, how she missed roving around the country in the Coyote with sparse money and even less assurance of their freedom. Duke had teased her during the conversation – “Finally warming up to us, huh?” – but only days later she had received her combat orders and the mission briefing that detailed exactly where she was going, why she was doing it, and with whom she would be teamed up, and all of their names had cascaded down the page in a neat list, Army-crisp and official. She had been overjoyed then. Now, though, they were right back where they’d been a year ago, with no superiors and no backup and a very dangerous enemy ahead. They were going to come to a confrontation again soon. Maybe it wouldn’t be this mission, maybe not even the next one, but soon. Eventually Scarlett and her team were going to have to fight for their lives, physically and mentally, against some of the few truly evil people in the world, and she was the one who had brought them this battle.

Engrossed in these thoughts, it took an embarrassingly long time for her to realize there was something wrong. The three of them that had dominated most of the conversation since the fight with the Viper had been silent for a few minutes, the gentle sloshing of water filling the empty space around them. She had tuned this out, turning her attention mostly inward as she planned, schemed, and fought with her guilt. This, however, did not serve as a good enough excuse as to why it took so long for her to realize that Snake Eyes was beginning to wobble next to her.

She turned her head in the darkness. Their pace was strange enough as he limped between Scarlett and Tunnel Rat, the going awkward because of their height differences, but there was something about the way he was shaking that caught her attention far too late. Her right arm was around his upper torso. Beneath the fabric of her sleeve and the thick material of his outfit, he was shaking. His breathing was unusual, nothing like the steady, even pace that she knew. She had a flashback to the night before, the sound of his breathing right next to her as smooth and sure as it had ever been. It did not sound like that now.

“Guys,” she said. She heard the procession stop, heard them turn and face her. Roadblock lifted the flashlight to illuminate her chest, residual light reflecting back into her face.

“There’s something wrong.”

Ripcord stepped close and put his hand on Duke’s arm. “What is it?”

“Not with him-,” she began, and then realized she was wrong. Duke was standing with his head down, his hands clenched into fists by his thighs. What little of his face she could see was screwed up in an expression of pain.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him, then turned her face to Snake Eyes beside her. “You too, what’s happening?”

“Can’t breathe…” Tunnel Rat croaked.

“Feels like… weight…” Duke strained.

Roadblock stepped close and lifted the flashlight so that it shone straight down like an overhead lamp. “All three of you?”

Three heads nodded.

Scarlett looked at the other two unafflicted. They met her gaze, concern and fear lining their eyes. “Let’s sit,” she said.

She lowered the ninja to the ground carefully, balancing his weight. Ripcord helped Duke, Roadblock with Tunnel Rat.

They all crouched together in the wide, dark tunnel. Scarlett kept her hands on Snake, unwilling to let go and break the contact with him. It scared her to see him like this, since for so long he had been the one steady and constant presence by her side. She knew he was only human, had insisted on taking care of him like was weaker than he thought he was, but it was different with illness. He wasn’t often sick; she’d nursed him through the flu only once in the years she’d known him. Injuries were different than illness; she could treat injuries. She could help prevent injuries.

“What is it, something in the air?” she asked. The first step was to diagnose. The first step was to know.

“That hissing noise, after the Viper. They pumped something into the tunnel.”

“Then why aren’t we affected, as well?”

Roadblock had no answer for this.

Ripcord was watching Duke’s face. “Guys, it’s getting worse,” he said.

It was. Duke’s face was getting pale. The scar under his eye was white and stark against the usual tan color of his cheeks. He was bent over, wheezing now. Scarlett could hear air whistling through his mouth. Tunnel Rat was also fighting harder for breath, making noises of pain. His hand was pressed flat to his chest. Snake Eyes was shaking harder than ever, fighting it. Scarlett pulled him backwards into her lap, making him lie against her. “Make them lean back, open their airways,” she ordered the other two, who obliged quickly. “Guys, you need to calm down. Regulate your breathing. Don’t panic.”

“Scarlett, it looks like the allergy attack you had with Storm Shadow’s poison, remember? Except much slower acting.”

Anaphylaxis. She knew those symptoms. She’d seen a boy keel over after accidentally eating peanuts on her school playground once. The experience had terrified her. She’d relived it while on the ground outside the dojo, clutching her throat and desperate for air, remembering the wheeze of his lungs while the dizzying feeling of brain death clouded her mind.

“It’s gonna be all right, it’s gonna be all right,” she said, her hands going to Snake’s jawline to pull it backward, lengthening his trachea. His visor was pointed straight up into her face, and she wondered if he was looking at her or if his eyes were closed. One of his gloved hands came up. His fingers touched hers and she snatched at it like a lifeline, holding his hand and squeezing it, hoping the touch was reassuring instead of panicking.

“What do we do?” she asked the others, who had followed her lead and were holding the wheezing Joes as prone as they could go in the water.

“It’s not as fast as a regular allergy. We might have time to get them to the surface,” Roadblock said. He was stroking Tunnel Rat’s hair with one hand, holding him down against his thighs as he kneeled on the floor of the tunnel. “We need epinephrine. We might have some in the Coyote, I know Doc supplied us with a full field medical kit before we left.”

“I’ll get it,” said Scarlett. “I’ll get up there somehow and I’ll bring it back.”

“We should bring them with us-.”

“We can’t move them, they need to sit quietly-.”

“Stop arguing, Scarlett. You run ahead and get the kit. Rip and I will carry them behind you. However far we get will shorten the length when you finally do double back.”

She was glad Roadblock had a level head. She was glad she had her teammates. She wasn’t panicking – their teammates were still getting air, they were still able to breathe – but she was glad to have other people who could offer a second input.

“All right. Snake, Duke, Rat, I’ll be right back. You’re gonna be okay.”

She stood and released her friend to Roadblock, who lifted the ninja and Duke like they were nothing. Ripcord helped Tunnel Rat stand and then bent at the knees to lift him in a fireman’s carry, Tunnel Rat’s body jackknifed over Rip’s shoulder. He groaned and wheezed out what was probably a quip, but Scarlett was already too far away to hear, splashing through the water back the way they’d come. She held her pocket computer for light in one hand and trailed her other hand’s fingertips along the cold iron of the tunnel as she went, flying half-blind and mad with worry. She remembered the Anaconda strain virus; Cobra was not above chemical warfare, which if course had been internationally outlawed since World War Two. She worried that there was more to come and that, even if she was able to get them to it in time, the epinephrine wouldn’t work in curing their distress.

The tunnel was completely different than the one she had been expecting, but she couldn’t help but feel grateful for the confusion now. It was one single straight line, seemingly connected only to the two gulleys on either side and the smaller capillary tunnels that fed into it at the top, big enough only for the occasional rat to scramble through. She had only two directions to choose, forwards or backwards, and she knew what would be coming backwards. The dead Viper would mark the bigger section of tunnel that they’d fallen into; when she got there, she would have to struggle up the incline like a child on a playground slide. They hadn’t wanted to try that before, thinking there were other ways to get in and out, but now it was her only option. She would climb it. She would rub her skin raw, she would tear out fingernails, but she would climb it to get to the Coyote parked only meters away.

Scarlett came out into the largest section of the tunnel, the part where they’d fought the Viper and had apparently been dosed with something that only affected half of them. She lifted the pocket computer high to illuminate as much of the room as she could. She felt almost like a bat, adjusted to the pitch-black; the light bouncing off the water’s surface at her feet sometimes caught her eyes and made her wince. When she saw the opening of the tunnel incline, she ran to it, stowing her computer safely in the pocket of her pants. She would need both hands, blast the dark. She could do it without light.

With the first step up, she knew it was going to be almost impossible. Her boots would not catch on the wet iron, and there were no handholds for her fingers to grab. Her fingers were puckered with the wet by now, but even the added raisin texture did nothing to help her or keep her from sliding back down. She keeled backwards on her knees and landed on the edge of the inclined tunnel right on her shin. She hissed, grabbing the injury in the dark.

There was a bark of laughter right behind her.

She swept up with her blaster, shouting, “Who’s there?” Her heart raced. It had come from the tunnel where the Viper’s body lay, only about ten feet from her. It had not sounded kind.

She heard nothing else. “Reveal yourself or I shoot, I swear to god,” she said.

“Lower your weapon, bitch.”

The sound of the voice threw her heart into her throat. Scarlett loved her some good old fashioned horror films, but living through one was completely different. She wanted to scream like a murder victim in a slasher film, but she kept that down.

“Don’t get any closer, or I’ll blast you away,” she said.

There were snickers. More than one. “You and what army, sweetheart? You’re outnumbered.”

“US Army,” Scarlett snapped. “Do anything to any of us and we’ll bring down a world of trouble.”

“Like that scares us.”

“Yeah, you guys can’t do shit to us.”

“Just come with us. We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Show yourselves!” Scarlett screamed. There were at least four unique voices.

“You’re outnumbered, Joe. You’re _our_ prisoner, not the other way around.”

“It’s not just me,” she snarled.

“What, you mean the ones who are currently flopping around like fishes out of water?”

Scarlett wanted so badly to shoot, but she remembered what blaster fire did in the small confines of the rounded-walls tunnel. She didn’t have a target. The voices were slightly muffled but also echoed, and she had no basis for a direction to start. She also believed them that she was badly outnumbered, and they sounded untrained, like private security, and she wouldn’t trust them not to hurt her badly.

“Look, Joe, we were sent to round you up. Come quietly. We’re taking you and your friends to the lab. You have people waiting for you there.”

She was trapped. She had no recourse. She would also not surrender. Joes, _soldiers_ , did not surrender.

“Come and get me,” she whispered. She fired.

The blasts lit up the tunnel and revealed several bodies in combat armor and headgear that obscured their faces. They were all holding blasters just like the ones her team carried, and she had to remind herself that their weapons had originally been Cobra issue. Her shots connected with a few of the bodies directly in front, but the light from her blasts died down too quickly for her to make much sense. Then they began to fire as well, and she ran, trying to avoid the sizzle that burned flesh and melted fabric. One shot caught her straight on her left thigh, high up, and she screamed before she could help it, falling into the water. She managed to return a few more shots from her place on the floor, but their own fire had died down as soon as she was hit. So whoever their boss was wanted them alive.

There was the sound of water splashing, then heavy hands grabbed at her and lifted her to her feet. There had been no jostling or hesitation; they were obviously wearing night-vision goggles of some sort, letting them see in the dark while she was completely blind. She was frog-marched between two of them somewhere. She’d lost her sense of direction.

Light blinded her more completely than the darkness, and she flinched against it. There was a rush of warm air that was almost welcome, despite its connotations of imprisonment, since it had been so chilly in the tunnel.

When she regained her sight, she saw a large, dull concrete room that had been fashioned into a laboratory. She turned her head behind her and saw a door closing in the wall, but not before getting one last glimpse of the big tunnel. So there had been a door hidden in the wall. Go figure.

The lab was low ceilinged but bright. Glass and metal glittered in the sterile air. Long tables held bulky, scientific-looking structures. In one corner, what looked like industrial-strength computer servers stood tall and thin, blinking blue LED lights on the faces.

She observed the men who held her. They were in dark navy blue uniforms, heavy with armor and the helmets that obstructed their faces. They were all big and identical in their anonymity, standing at attention. The two who held her were gentle but firm, not looking at her, not squeezing too hard or trailing their hands anywhere they shouldn’t. Her thigh throbbed with every heartbeat.

Another door opened on their right. More soldiers streamed in, two for each of her teammates whom they flanked. Scarlett leaned forward and took in their faces, wanting to see them alive and well. Roadblock and Ripcord were both bloodier than they had been when she’d left, but Duke, Tunnel Rat, and Snake Eyes were the worst off: they were barely able to stand, and the two without masks were pale and sweaty, their eyes barely open as they struggled to breathe.

Roadblock made eye contact with her. He quirked an eyebrow. _What is this?_

 _I have no idea_ , she said with the tiniest of head shakes. She was worried. This was nothing like she’d expected.

“Face forward,” grunted one of the men who flanked her. She obeyed out of curiosity.

Another door, this one opposite her teammates, on her left, slid open with an electronic gasp. A woman walked through, surveying the scene and the captives with hard eyes. She was fairly tall and well-built for her size. Her hair was bubblegum pink, but other than that whimsical little feature, everything about her screamed ‘mob boss’. She wore a professional looking blazer over a gray-blue top and long trousers that showed off her muscular thighs. Her makeup was flawless, if a little dark for the hour of the day, and her fingernails were cherry red. Her face was handsome, not pretty, but Scarlett stared at it, fascinated. There was something familiar…

The woman smiled cruelly at Scarlett, then raised a hand and made a motion. The soldiers let go of her upper arms.

“Welcome to Cobra Pharmaceuticals, GI Joes,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your stay.”


	5. Chapter 5

Wallace “Ripcord” Weems of the G.I. Joes watched suspiciously as the woman began to pace in front of them. He and the others had been jostled and pushed to go stand with Scarlett in front of the woman, and now he stood with his trigger finger itching and the dormant Bio-Viper material in his DNA roiling under his skin. They were handcuffed and stood with gun muzzles pressed gently into the base of their necks.

“We’re so glad you could join us,” said the woman. Her voice was mockingly saccharine, but the sweetness did not extend to her eyes. Rip watched her gaze as it swept over all of them and paused on him. He glared deeply. Beside him, Duke was wheezing, his head down, held upright by the private contractors. There wasn’t much more time.

“Patient X,” purred the woman. She reached out a hand and traced his jawline with one cherry red fingernail. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t had the same pleasure,” he replied, and was struck with his brilliance. Damn, sometimes he was good!

“Me? You haven’t seen the- the family resemblance?” She tossed her head so her chin-length haircut bounced and struck a comical pose with her hands on her hips. “Maybe if I sat atop a motorcycle? Or smashed some redneck’s chicken coop just because I could?”

Rip had no idea what she was talking about and worried that they were in the hands of a truly insane person. But Roadblock, on the end of the lineup, said, “Zartan,” with a mouth full of disgust.

“Right in one!” she crowed. “They told me you Joes were smart.”

“You’re… Zartan?” Scarlett asked.

The pink-haired woman slapped her across the face without so much as changing her expression. Her cruel eyes glittered as the other Joes roared their outrage and were tugged backwards by the contractors still lined up behind them.

“Do I look like Zartan?” she demanded. “Do I look like that oaf who couldn’t go three days without being captured by police and military? Do I look like someone who couldn’t mastermind escape from prison even if he was given the tools smuggled in a birthday cake?” Her voice got higher.

“Who are you, then?” Scarlett asked. She sounded plenty tired of riddles and go-arounds, same as Ripcord, but he didn’t want to provoke the unstable woman.

“I’m Zarana.”

There was silence as the Joes took in this information, digested it, and then did nothing else.

The woman looked at all of them again, her face breaking into a wide smile. “Zarana. Guys. C’mon. Zartan’s sister!”

Oh. Her. Of course. How had they not seen that.

“Nice to meet you,” Ripcord sneered, braving a blow of his own. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Oh, gosh, that reminds me, thank you, Patient X.” She went to a long table full of mishmash laboratory supplies and busied herself there, making lots of noise as glass clinked together and heavy objects were scattered. Then she came back with a thick metal ring in her hands. She stepped close to him and opened the ring with the hinges on one side so that it halved. He struggled as she placed it around his neck and clicked it shut again, but the soldier behind him kept the gun pressed into the vertebrae of his spine so that he couldn’t do much. Rip swallowed with difficulty around the tight ring. The other Joes were watching but he didn’t want to meet their eyes and see the fear there.

“This,” she said, holding up a small remote with a LED sensor light on the front, “was my idea.” She pressed the button on the remote.

His whole body, from his neck down, went completely numb. He crumpled to the ground and was caught by two men, held up by his armpits. He couldn’t feel a thing from his entire body, no sensory inputs, no pressure, nothing. His heart and lungs were still going, so he knew he hadn’t been paralyzed, but he was currently living through his worst fear of his life. “What- What did you do?” he shouted, turning his neck with difficulty to look up at her; half of it was numb and would not respond to his nervous system signals, making it hard to move.

“Numb. Just numb. Don’t worry, it’s temporary. We wouldn’t hurt our dear Patient X too badly. You’re the future, my love.” Zarana touched his cheek tenderly, and the warmth from her fingertips was almost welcome, as it showed that at least something was still working in his body.

“’We’? Working for Cobra? Hate to tell you, but Cobra’s lost. It’s over. There isn’t a ‘we’ anymore,” Scarlett spat. Rip turned his head with more difficulty to watch Zarana go to stand directly in front of his lieutenant.

“Oh no?” Zarana whispered. “Says who?”

“Says the United States Army.”

“Yes, you do seem to have a lot of faith in your military, Lieutenant O’Hara.” Zarana turned away from her and went back to the table, her hands idly brushing against the tools and beakers there, trailing along the items as she walked. “You forget the trouble we gave you all through last year. You forget the power we had.”

“You forget that we beat your sorry ass,” Roadblock growled.

Zarana cocked her head towards him like she wanted him to know she was listening, but she was busy playing with more devices in her hands, rolling them like she was going to do a magic trick. “What defines a beating, Corporal? Yes, you blew up the compounds, yes, you stopped us from getting our M.A.S.S. device working. Yes, you may have killed a few of our own.” She looked up at them, her dark eyes heavy with patronization.

Ripcord felt something cool touch his neck just above the collar. He flinched away from it instinctively, but then he was rolling as blinding pain shot through his head, like his very skin was on fire. He went deaf and limp, screaming in a primal, childish way.

He came to with his cheek pressed to the cold floor. The numbing collar was still on, so he could only move his head. He was lifted to his knees while his cheeks and forehead prickled with aftershocks. Beside him, Scarlett and Roadblock were panting, also kneeling, their hands pulled behind their backs. Scarlett’s hair was falling around her face in frizzy clumps. Duke, Tunnel Rat, and Snake Eyes were being half-carried, half-marched out the door; just as he looked, the door closed with a swish.

“Like it?” Zarana gushed. “Another of mine. I’m an inventor, you see, much more technical than my brother. I supply ingenious, if I do say so myself, quite ingenious little products to people who need help getting their points across. I have contacts all around the world who come to me for help.” She adopted a heavy Eastern European accent. “Oh, Zarana, ve vant you, ve needs you. I need to make zem listen. I haff to make my point.”

“And Cobra just eats it up, I bet,” Scarlett said breathlessly.

Zarana threw her a sharp look, trying to decide if she was being mocked. “Oh yes, in fact. They love my work. If I had gotten a contract with them a little sooner, maybe you buzzing little Joes might not have been such an issue.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Ripcord said.

“Careful, Patient X,” she said to him softly, her eyes narrowing. “I’ve been ordered not to hurt you as much, but listen up. I have your friends.”

“Stop calling me Patient X,” he snarled with more bravado than he was capable of at the moment.

“Where are the others?” asked Roadblock, who had seemed to miss them only that moment.

“They’re with my comrade down the hall. Shall I educate you on just what we’ve been doing here in the last few months?”

“We’d love to hear it,” Scarlett said.

“Excellent,” Zarana trilled. “It’s to die for, honestly.”

Ripcord struggled to feel the rest of his body. He could feel his heart beating in his chest and the painful gnawing in his belly that spoke of hunger and fear – he got hungry when he was frightened, he didn’t know why – but his muscles and skin were switched off, in a way. He couldn’t move a toe or squeeze a muscle. He was helpless. He didn’t like being helpless.

Zarana pulled a lab stool over and perched on it, her short heels hooked on the bottom rung. She held her ankles together and sat like a co-ed at a soda fountain, gazing down at them with a mischievous smile on her face.

“So, you nasty Joes made lots of trouble for dear old Adam DeCobray and his lot. The M.A.S.S. device was his pride and joy, but it certainly wasn’t the only trick up his billowing sleeve. After you blew up the compound and took off to finish your vendetta against them, they regrouped. Anastasia – Baroness, to you – was dead, or lost to the wormhole. So was Mindbender, a tragic loss for our R&D department. Half their troops had been decimated, most of our technology…” She trailed off, seeing their faces light up with triumphant smirks. She held up the small device that had activated the pain from before and smiled cruelly at the flinch they all gave. “Remember that you are helpless now,” she said dangerously. Then she continued. “But we certainly weren’t beaten. Cobra is bigger than you can even imagine. We have more money, more manpower, and more ambition than even you thought, Miss O’Hara, you sticking your perky little nose in wherever it could go, getting yourself into trouble.

“So Cobra Commander came to me and asked me to continue the legacy of his greatest lieutenants. Zartan might have a reputation in the small towns of the Midwest, but my name is whispered in the back rooms and dark alleys of every country in the world. He’d heard of my prowess in interrogation, knew I had my own set of people who were always looking for a paycheck and a lab to play in, so he brought me in. It’s-.”

“I’m sorry,” said Scarlett derisively, and Zarana’s eyes popped at being interrupted. “DeCobray came for you after the M.A.S.S. disaster? _After_ he died? If you expect us to believe that-.”

“No one said he died, dear.”

The three Joes exchanged looks from where they were, kneeling on the ground in front of soldiers who could kill them easily, in front of a madwoman with a device that could torture someone into insanity if she so dared. The day so far had been a whirlwind of failure and fear, and yet the last thing Ripcord still expected was to hear that the aging, wheezing old man who hadn’t been able to stand up straight had survived being melted by boiling hot Viper goo.

“He’s alive?”

There was a hiss of television static and then a hiss of a voice, one they hadn’t heard in six months. Ripcord suppressed a shiver that wound down his numb back; he wasn’t prone to nightmares, but when he was woken in the middle of the night, it was to the sound of this voice.

“Why, yes, Miss O’Hara. Did you miss me?”

The three Joes looked to their right, seeing a flatscreen monitor perched high on the wall. On it, where it had once been black and unremarkable, was now the unmistakable figure of the head of Cobra Industries. He was looking at them, his whole face covered by the mirrored, shiny mask they had seen on him during the fight at the Viper plant.

“Can’t say I did, no,” sniffed Scarlett, earning herself another across-the-cheek blow from Zarana that made her wobble on her knees. Tendons in Ripcord’s neck stood out as he struggled to launch himself up, trying to find that one switch inside himself that activated the Bio-Viper material, but it, like his body, was numb and unreachable.

“My associate here has been too kind. Zarana, I told you I wanted to watch them suffer.”

“Of course, sir. Shall I begin the extraction, as well?”

“By all means,” he growled, drawing out the ‘s’ sound. “Alert me when you’re finished.”

“Of course, Commander.”

The screen blinked out.

“What, he couldn’t stay to chat?” Ripcord asked obnoxiously. “You’d think he’d want to tell us all about how he survived, how he’s gonna kill us, blah blah blah.”

“No, silly goose, that’s my job,” Zarana said with a coy smile.

Rip and the others were knocked sideways again by the shock of the pain, their screams winding high and plaintive. The shocks, for that’s what he figured they were, delivered by the flat metal discs that the contractors pressed into their necks, came steadily but didn’t last as long as the first time, only two or three seconds of pure, soul-piercing pain. They recovered and were righted again by the soldiers, breathing heavily and flush with the aftermath.

“I told you I’m good at interrogation,” Zarana said, crossing her ankles and leaning forward on the stool, the small remote in one hand. “You see, Joes, we brought you here today to get something from you. This wasn’t just about a nice little trap, la de dah, you see, you leave, you plan to fight another day, no, really, this is about so much more. Joe vs Cobra, the endless battle. Well, today, we come to the end.”

She lifted the remote and Ripcord braced himself, but there was no way to shield oneself from the pain that burrowed deep and gnawed at him like a million bee stings. He noticed that it only came from his head and neck, the parts of him that weren’t numb, and he knew Scarlett and Roadblock were getting it ten times worse, and he knew he would kill Zarana, military honor and code of war be damned.

“We set this up, bait, if you will. We knew GI Joe would come. We’ve been fighting you for a while now, not just you six, I mean, but your unit, your entire team. Cobra plants, stores, factories, and caches have been decimated one by one, and not even we can keep up. This irritates us.” She brandished the remote and they all flinched again, but she was just holding it up. “I came up with this plan. I figured you out, you see. You Joes must have your own base somewhere; your unit is too big, made up of at least one hundred different people.” She pointed to the monitor screen again and it flashed on, this time showing a slideshow of shots from security camera footage. Joes he recognized flashed by, a different one each time: Barbeque, Cover Girl, Tripwire, Heavy Duty, all on raids they’d done on Cobra buildings. She clicked through it with a different remote – goddamn, how many of those did she have in her pockets? – and kept talking. “We’ve kept track. Different people, different leaders, all Joes. At least a hundred. I came up with the idea that you must have your own base of operations. An HQ, if you will.”

Realization dawned on Ripcord. He went cold at the knowledge of what was coming.

“So we put out bait. We only needed to capture a few of you. You’d be useful somehow. We put out the information we knew you’d get and waited. It only took a few hours. Even we were impressed by your speed. When we saw that GI Joe had infiltrated our systems, we prepared. It would only take a few days for you to show up. We watched. We saw your stolen Cobra truck come up the road and park near the pipe gulley. We watched you get out. The joy-.” At this point Zarana hugged herself, pointing her face up at the ceiling. “The joy when we saw who it was. All six of you. Even the ninja. The originals. It was like a dream come true.”

“Where are our friends?” Ripcord spat suddenly. The woman glared at him.

“Just wait, Patient X, I’m getting there.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“We have cameras everywhere. When we saw your plan, coming up through the pipes, we got ready. We sent the Viper, just to test you out, get your juices flowing. Then we gassed you.” Her face split into a wide, crazy-eyed grin. “Do you want to know what that gas was?”

None of them answered. They were tired of the games.

Zarana was on a roll, however, and didn’t notice their surly faces. “It’s a new thing. Dr. Venom, one of the associates I brought along with me, has been developing it for years, but he’s never had the grants or the workspaces he’s needed to really get down and dirty with his work. At Cobra, it only took a few months to speed up what had taken years before now. It’s a new substance, this gas. It triggers the adenoidal response found in allergy sufferers. If you’re allergic to anything, or even if you were as a child but aren’t now, you go into an asthma-like attack. It’s brilliant.”

Ripcord remembered the sounds his teammates were making, the fear and pain as they slowly succumbed to the attacks. He hated this woman, more than he’d ever hated a person in his life.

“So now your friends are with the good doctor in another room. This is the first human test we’ve had, he’s very excited. As for you…”

Zarana stepped over to Scarlett and cupped her chin in her hand, digging her red fingernails into her skin. “Where is your base of operations?”

Scarlett glared.

Zarana lifted her gaze and nodded at the soldier who stood behind.

Scarlett screamed and doubled over.

“Stop! Stop!” shouted Roadblock and Ripcord, but one was held back by the contractor behind him and one was powerless to even move.

“Where is your base?” Zarana asked again.

“Lieutenant O’Hara, Shana, two-two-nine-two.”

Zarana shocked her again. “Where is the Joe headquarters?”

“L-Lieutenant O’Hara, Shana, two-two-nine-two.”

Ripcord shouted a stream of curse words, his heart rat-a-tat-tatting in his neck against the collar. Zarana looked over at him and left Scarlett where she was lying on the ground, breathing hard.

“Do you want to tell me?”

“Go to hell!” he spat, baring his teeth.

She shocked him after the soldier behind pressed the disc to his neck, and he lost himself to the pain again. It was fire, it was ice, it was sharp and deadly like glass slivers under his skin-

“Where is your base?”

“PFC Weems, Wallace, nine-five-oh-one,” he said, his eyes watering. He blinked to clear them and continue his defiant glare at her, but she had already moved down the line to Roadblock on the other end.

“Corporal Hinton, Marvin, oh-oh-eight-seven,” Roadblock said before she could even ask, and he received a shock from her as she screamed her rage.

“I-If this is how you interrogate everyone, I think Cobra Commander might need to ask for his money back,” Rip panted, laughing breathlessly.

Zarana reached out and bodily dragged Scarlett away from the line across the floor, turning her to face her teammates. Ripcord’s smile evaporated in an instant. He’d been expecting another shock, wanting her to turn her attention back to him. His pain levels were nothing compared to what the other two were getting, so he could take it longer. But Zarana seemed to have understood this. She held out a hand and the soldier who had been in charge of Scarlett tossed her a regular .9mm pistol.

Scarlett was breathing fast and sharp through her nose, looking at Ripcord. Zarana held the gun up to her skull.

“Patient X, what was that you said?”

“Nothing. I didn’t-.”

“Did you say the location of GI Joe?”

Scarlett did not break eye contact. _Don’t_ , she was saying. _It’s not worth it._

“No,” he said. It was the hardest word he’d ever had to say in his life, but it came out as easily as breathing.

Zarana cocked her head. She seemed surprised. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Scarlett closed her eyes.

Ripcord didn’t let himself look away.

There was a crash, loud as thunder, that seemed to shake the room. Zarana flinched, turning the gun away from Scarlett’s head, looking up at the ceiling and muttering, “What the hell?”

Scarlett lunged forward on her knees towards Ripcord, buried her face in his neck, and came away with the metal collar in her teeth, hanging open on its hinges.

There were several gunshots and blaster shots, but he had already grown to eight feet tall, and he was angry.


	6. Chapter 6

Duke wasn’t aware of most of what was happening in the room. He had been in a sort of foggy limbo since coming down with the allergy in the pipe, and when Scarlett had run off to get help, he had sunk down into a twilight-state, just trying to concentrate on his breathing and nothing else. The private-contracted soldiers who had come for them had been stealthy and strong, and it hadn’t taken much to subdue Ripcord and Roadblock while they were burdened with the three others.

He tried to listen, he really did, but there was a stitch in his chest from fighting so hard to breathe. He’d never known that you could pull a muscle just by breathing, but it felt like his whole upper torso was on fire. His throat, too, was raw and ragged, and he was dizzy, and he couldn’t stand, and his hands kept clawing up like he needed to hold onto something just to brace himself. He knew the other two were just as bad off as he was, and he worried that they wouldn’t last much longer. He worried about the three who weren’t affected, who were talking with the woman who identified herself as a part of Cobra, and he worried that Scarlett wouldn’t be able to hold her tongue as the slap rang across the room like a cymbal crash.

He worried the most when he heard their screams echo in the air, and worried when he, Snake Eyes, and Tunnel Rat were escorted out of the room, their boots dragging on the ground because they couldn’t walk.

He was brought into another room and placed on his back on a hard table. His face was screwed up in pain and his chin lifted, stretching his trachea. Someone placed a hand on his forehead and murmured soothingly. He felt restraints on his wrists, but he was too weak to have fought anyway. He needed to breathe. He needed air.

An oxygen mask was fitted over his mouth and nose. Cold but pure oxygen flowed over his lips, and he sucked hard. He felt his flak vest being removed, or at least opened to expose his black T-shirt underneath, which was torn open with a rip. He made a sound.

“I know, but we need to monitor you,” said a female voice.

He felt pressure as a clip was secured onto one of his fingertips. A steady, fast beeping began somewhere in the room. Seconds later, two other sets of beeps started up, rhythmic and rapid. Heartbeats.

Duke turned his face but he couldn’t open his eyes. He was working so hard. He was so tired.

Somewhere in the distance, voices were talking in murmurs, too softly to be understood. Someone was bustling over him, placing more sensors on his skin. He made another throaty sound as a prick of pain in his elbow caught him by surprise, but it was over in an instant, the hands working over him obviously skilled.

“O2 levels at 86,” said a voice close to his ear. Duke turned his head toward it, his skull rolling on the hard surface of the table, listening groggily. Air was pulsing gently over his mouth and nose, but the dizziness was not subsiding.

“84 and 94 here.”

“Interesting. The ninja-.”

“Yes, maintaining an average.”

“Whurr our friends,” Duke slurred suddenly.

“Sergeant, you rest. No need to concern yourself with them.”

Across the room somewhere, Tunnel Rat was also arguing, his breathy, nasally voice weak but insistent. Duke tried to sit up, opening his eyes, but he was blinded by lights overhead, and he did not have the strength to wrench his wrists from the padded restraints that tied him down.

“No, no, no. None of that now.”

A hand pressed to his bare chest, subtle pressure on a place that was so sensitive that he flinched away, making the beeps coming from the machine closest to him increase in desperation and rate.

“Now, really, Sergeant, you act like we’re the bad guys here!”

“Fckyu,” he spat.

The same insistent, omnipresent hand pressed down on his forehead, arching his neck up. He breathed fast and quick, the air whistling into his straining, tired lungs. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for, but he was sure it would be more pain. He wanted to escape, wanted to rescue his other teammates with Tunnel Rat and Snake Eyes by his side, and he wanted to never, ever see the inside of a hospital room or a clinic or a doctor’s office ever again. He’d been allergic to peanuts as a child, not too badly, but enough to warrant a few visits here and there when other kids offered him candy or snacks that had the pesky nuts inside. His mother had sung hallelujah when the allergy had abated, like they did sometimes, and he’d almost forgotten about it in the way that events that seemed so big as a kid faded after time. Now, he was reliving every panic-inducing, sweaty, fearful moment from the danger of food that could kill you, multiplied by a thousand because of the other lives that he felt so responsible for.

“Oh, Doctor. Here is the first one.”

Duke’s limbs began to get loose and distant. He was being drugged. There was an IV in his arm. His eyeballs rolled beneath the lids as his thoughts became slurred. He was worse than loopy, worse than disoriented, drunker than he’d been in a long time, and fading by the second.

“Ah, the sergeant. What are his stats?”

This voice made him recoil. He forced his eyes open and stared into a handsome, middle-aged face that held no warmth or kindness whatsoever. The man was staring at Duke with a clinical detachment that scared him more than anything else that had happened, as he lay on the table with complete, universal vulnerability. He was open to the world, quite literally, his bare chest and bare neck there for anyone to cut into.

“70 over 45, heart rate 110, O2 at 87 now after oxygen for three minutes,” recited the original voice. Duke rolled his gaze over to see a plump, blonde nurse with a calm, neutral expression standing by his head. Her palm was still on his forehead, holding it down.

“He’s a soldier, his BP and pulse would normally be excellent,” said the man. He wore a lab coat and a long, thin black tie.

“Yes. The ninja-.”

“I’ll go see.”

Both of them padded away from Duke’s table, light on their feet and talking in serious tones. Talking about them as if they were specimens, not live, real people who were in pain and terrified and dying.

“Tnlrat,” Duke slurred.

“Duke!”

“FUBAR.”

“Affirm.”

This mission was scrubbed, fucked up beyond all reason. They needed to get the hell out of there.

With sheer grit that even impressed him later, Duke contracted his stomach muscles and sat up, dragged the IV in the crook of his arm and the nasal cannula trailing behind him. His wrists were still bound, but he could see the whole room now beyond the fog of his sight; everything looked detached, like he was seeing it through a glass window instead of his eyes, but he made out Snake Eyes and Tunnel Rat also lying prone on their own wheeled tables, forming a crude triangle with his. The rest of the room was the stereotypical blandness of an operating room, all whites and greens and shiny silver. Cabinets along the walls held any number of deadly poisons, drawers hid deadly instruments he could use to cut, tear, or stab. The doctor and who he took to be a nurse had their backs to him, standing over Snake Eyes. He could see skin and knew that his shirt had also been ripped away. Peeking out from between the doctor’s side and bent elbow was a flash of cheek. Duke tried not to look at it, feeling sick to his stomach like he was seeing something obscene.

Tunnel Rat’s head was turned to look at Duke, urging him on silently with wide eyes. His skin was ashy and shiny with sweat, and his chest was rising and falling with the struggle that Duke knew all too well. He too was bare-chested, looking very small beside the machines that were taking down every private detail of his body.

Duke inhaled as big a breath as he could take through his constricted windpipe and wrenched at the padded restraints. The IV in his arm flashed painfully and pierced further into his vein, breaking the connection that piped in whatever drug they were giving him. Blood pooled just under the skin, forming an immediate, deeply purple bruise, and began to leak out of the hole the needle had formed.

His head cleared, just a bit, and he thought maybe that whatever medication they were giving him had to be continuously dosed because it worked out of his system too fast. He curled up and bit at the small needle, tasting blood, and drew it from himself, tearing his skin and bleeding even more, but at least that one connection was gone. He didn’t want to get rid of the oxygen just yet, not until the asthma faded or another solution was discovered.

There was a shout and several strong arms wrapped around his chest, but he was driven by adrenaline and the taste of freedom that was metallic on his tongue, and he didn’t allow himself to be pulled backwards. He struggled, giving the orderlies who were wrestling with him a ride as his wide shoulders rocked back and forth, pulling them along. He heard animals growling and realized that was coming from him. The dizziness was back in force. He was still dosed with whatever they’d given him in the tunnel and his brain wasn’t getting enough air. He wondered if he was going to die.

The doctor with the cruel face came at him suddenly from the front, holding a syringe pulled full of a clear liquid that he didn’t want anywhere near his veins. Duke roared angrily, wheezily, and broke the wrist straps on his bed just as the door to the room burst open and Joes flew in, blasters exploding in color and sound. He rolled sideways and hit the floor hard. The cannula fell out of his nose and he felt like a pillow had been pressed up against his mouth. He scrabbled his fingers on the cold tile, trying to find the thin silicone tube that spelled life rather than death, and listened to the screams of the people that were being hit by hundreds of joules of their own creation.

“Duke!”

He looked up as soon as he hooked the tubes back around his ears and pushed the hard nosepiece into his nostrils and accepted Flint’s hand, leaning heavily into his arm as he got to his feet.

Behind Flint, Lady Jaye, Lifeline, Heavy Duty, and Ace were picking up the bodies of the orderlies who had been hit. Some of them were obviously alive, moaning in pain and for mercy. Some of them were eerily silent. Duke didn’t look at them. He looked at Flint. He gripped the man’s upper arm, supporting himself with his jelly legs.

“Flint to the rescue, as usual,” Flint said affectionately.

Duke collapsed. His vision swam. His throat and chest ached. He was so tired.

He heard more shouts and felt more hands, but these were warm and soft, hands that he trusted touching him. He was lifted and felt once again the cool hardness of the table, but this time he wasn’t afraid. His teammates-.

“Snake? Rat?” he choked.

“They’re fine, Duke. They’re here. Everyone’s fine.” Flint was standing by his head, his hand on Duke’s shoulder. Duke realized that Joes liked to touch, soldiers using physical contact to reassure themselves as well as the victim, and he found that he was so very glad that he’d been picked to accompany Scarlett to that plant in Springfield. Even if it had come to this. He wouldn’t have chosen a different life at all.

“Get him back on that monitor, no, no that one, yeah, on his finger!”

Lifeline was a field medic, a true one who’d gone to school for it and everything. He was soft-spoken and shy to a fault at all times except when one of his fellow Joes was in danger. Then he was a whirling dervish of command and skill. Duke followed the timbre of his voice tiredly, his eyes closed again. At least everyone was safe. At least they’d made a difference.

“No, Duke, damn you, none of that!” cried Lifeline, who had caught the gentle exhale of his breath and the too-slow inhale that followed too long after.

“What?”

“He’s dying. We need to fix him now.”

“How?”

“I don’t- Scarlett!”

“What?”

So Scarlett was there too. She was safe too. Roadblock and Ripcord would be, also. Good.

“It was inhaled?”

“That’s what she said, a gas.”

“Get Mainframe-.”

“She is, she’s looking with Breaker now.”

“How are Tunnel Rat and Snake Eyes?”

That was Lady Jaye, her whiskey voice familiar and comforting.

“Tunnel Rat is just as bad. Whatever was in that IV was also keeping their systems afloat. They both tore it out in the ruckus, and they’re crashing fast. Snake is a bit better, maintaining a better O2 sat, but still not great, and not for much longer.”

Duke heard this and was sorry for his teammates. They were going through exactly what he was. No one should have to do that.

“Lifeline! They’re spores. Mainframe and Breaker found notes. They’re spores in the lungs, attached to the alveoli lining.”

“Fuck.”

“They release the hormone that stimulates allergic reaction.”

“ _Fuck_ okay Flint go get the rest, we’ll need everybody. Scarlett, Lady Jaye, Heavy Duty, find me saline, somewhere, anywhere, lots of it. Ace, do you know what a bronchoscope looks like? It’s- yeah, good. Get one.”

Duke lifted his head a bit and opened his eyes. Everything was fuzzy and whimsically bright. Lifeline saw him looking and smiled reassuringly, like he knew what he was doing, like he did this every day. He smoothed Duke’s short buzzcut and whispered that it was going to be okay.

An alarm went off, high and keening and plaintive, signaling distress. Even Duke knew that sound. It wrought a change in Lifeline’s young face so quickly that he must have pulled a muscle in his cheek. The next millisecond he had jumped away, towards the sound, out of Duke’s line of sight, and his whole world was again the shiny steel and ceramic of a hospital room before he closed his eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

Marvin “Roadblock” Hinton of the G.I. Joes had a throbbing headache right behind his left eyebrow that was pinging like a homing beacon. His forehead was sweating, and the salt was stinging his eyes. He was hungry, sore, and pissed off that they’d walked into such a desperate trap.

He was also teetering on the edge of panic. The only thing keeping him from plunging into the sticky grip of maniacal, never-ending laughter was the fact that his sergeant’s life was literally in his hands.

He was standing at the head of the gurney, both his meaty palms pressed hard onto Duke’s bare shoulders. Standing beside him, so close that he could probably taste his pungent smell, Lifeline was threading a long, thin black tube down Duke’s throat. Roadblock was the muscle, holding him down. Even unconscious, Duke was fighting, the natural instinct of the human body to struggle and persist when it was being hurt, and he was definitely being hurt. The nasal cannula was still supplying him with the oxygen that was maintaining his life, but only one of his lungs was operating. The other one was being filled with warm saline, Lifeline literally drowning Duke’s lung to wash out the spores that he’d inhaled in the tunnel. It couldn’t be a nice feeling at all, and Duke’s mind was seeing it as an attack. He was thrashing and bucking and choking. Roadblock, Flint, and Ace were holding him down bodily. Duke was a big, strong man. It was not easy, even with his weakness from the allergy attack.

Roadblock grimaced at the sound Duke’s throat was making as Lifeline forced the tube down it. He had never been a very strong swimmer, and he remembered childhoods full of dread at the idea of sinking down below the surface of the local swimming pond, swallowed by the murky green depths. He pressed hard, his fingers digging into Duke’s flesh, watching as Ace and Flint grunted and groaned with the effort of keeping the sergeant’s legs and pelvis flat on the metallic gurney.

Across the room, Scarlett and Heavy Duty were attending to Snake Eyes. He was the one in the least amount of danger; through some sort of mysterious ninja training, he’d been able to keep himself from slowly suffocating like the others. His oxygen wasn’t nearly as low as the others had been. He was awake and alert, though sluggish, and he’d gladly allowed himself to be last in the line of procedures that Lifeline had to perform. Tunnel Rat had been attended to first, after alarm bells had signaled the sudden drop in his blood pressure. He went into shock very quickly, and Lifeline had sprung into action, ordering the other Joes to do exactly as he said, and they’d listened and worked well together, considering the circumstances. Roadblock had heard Lifeline tell Lady Jaye that she should have gone into medicine, and in a strange detachment, he’d filed that away for another day under “Strange things men have told women to get into their pants”.

The other Joes had staged a siege on the building after the first teams’ radios had gone silent while they were trapped in the tunnel. Flint and his team had been on standby in the Ops room in the Pit, watching their trackers that were connected to the radios. When they had slipped through the mouth of the tunnel, their signals had blinked off. GI Joe had scrambled, throwing the backup team into a plane that Ace had flown with all the skill of a pilot born and bred, and they had gotten to the building in only half an hour. It helped that they had large transport jets that flew faster than any commercial plane.

Flint had led the rest of his team through the building, finding very little in terms of diabolical plans for the world. Most of the rooms on the upper floors were offices which had been cleared out and stood unused, with only spiders to tell tales. They knew Scarlett and her team had gone up through the pipes, but they hadn’t wanted to follow. They were sure that the Originals were captured. By luck, they had walked right into a ready-room full of unprepared contractors, stepping into a firefight as the men in combat armor stood stupefied for a quarter of a breath and then began to fire. The subsequent explosions of blaster fire and other pyrotechnics had provided Scarlett and Ripcord the distraction they'd needed to free themselves from Zarana. Ripcord had ripped his way through the men that had shocked them, held guns up to them, and watched as Zarana had gloated and slapped her way through an evil mastermind monologue that surely would have led to just as much trouble for them as for the rest of the world. When Flint and his team had made it down to the laboratory, Ripcord was panting among the wreckage of broken glass and broken bodies, and Roadblock and Scarlett were already gone, chasing after Zarana as she’d fled down a corridor.

They had passed the door through which Snake Eyes, Tunnel Rat, and Duke had been taken, but they’d ignored it for the time being, not knowing that’s where the others were. They wanted to get Zarana before she escaped using come contingency plan she had cooked up. Unfortunately, it seems like she had gotten away, because Roadblock and Scarlett had doubled back somehow, coming back to the long hallway that connected the lab and the operating room where Flint and his team were already cleaning up the mess of the orderlies who had had the bad sense to fight back. Dr. Venom, so named by Zarana, and his portly, blonde nurse were nowhere to be found. Snake Eyes had filled Scarlett in with sign language while she shielded him from the others and replaced his mask and visor.

Ripcord was sitting with Tunnel Rat, talking quietly to him as the private breathed deeply underneath a full-mouth oxygen mask. He was sitting up, and color had come back into his cheeks. His eyes were closed, but he was nodding along to Ripcord, probably hearing about all they had learned while being tortured. A soft chuckle came from that side of the room, and Roadblock made up the joke he was sure had been said: “I dunno about you, but I’m sure glad I got shocked instead of dosed. That musta been a bitch.”

Beneath his hands, Duke was struggling for breath and for freedom. Roadblock held him down, whispering a mantra of, “I’m sorry, it’s okay man, it’s okay, I’m sorry.” Ace was being taken for a ride by Duke’s bucking legs, her curly hair whipping behind her, and Flint was grunting, trying to keep the sergeant prone and still.

“Okay,” said Lifeline. He was drawing the black tube back up. It was coming back slick with mucus and saline, sliding through Duke’s throat like a worm. Thank god he was unconscious. No one should have to experience this. Lifeline hadn’t been able to give him anesthetic, as he had little expertise in the area, which meant he could easily and fatally overdose the sick Joes.

“One down, one to go,” said the medic. Roadblock felt a surge of relief for one nice, long second before realizing that he’d meant lung, not people. Duke still had to go through at least five more minutes of this. He took a deep breath and held it, lessening the pressure of his hands just for a second, giving his sergeant a break.

“Hold him down, Roadblock.”

He leaned into it again just as Lifeline slipped the end of the bronchoscope past Duke’s teeth, just as Duke’s eyelids flew open and he bunched every muscle to sit up.

“Duke!” all three Joes who were holding him shouted. “Duke, stop!”

Lifeline had his hand over Duke’s mouth, looking grotesquely like he was trying to smother him. “Sergeant, hold still!” he commanded, but Duke seemed to be operating on pure instinct, reverting back to his reptilian brain of survival. His eyes were wild and unseeing. He was choking on the tube; Lifeline had told them that it wouldn’t cut off his air completely, but it would severely inhibit it, and the sensation of something dangling down into your lung was as unnatural as it could get.

Duke raised his arms to fight off Lifeline. Roadblock went around to this side and held both of his arms down at the forearm, leaning over his chest. “Duke, calm down, we’re trying to help you.”

He was trying to speak, probably swearing and spitting around the tube.

“Duke, don’t speak, you’ll damage your vocal cords! Calm down, I know it hurts but we’re fixing you!” Lifeline was trying his damnedest to control the bronchoscope, but Duke was moving his head from side to side, his eyes closed now.

Scarlett, Ripcord, and Heavy Duty came over and also threw themselves on his body, forming a dog pile of Joe on top of Joe so that Duke’s struggles became almost nil, even though he didn’t stop trying.

Lifeline wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist below the hem of his latex glove. “Scarlett and Rip, go look through the cabinets for a vial of haloperidol. It’ll be small, check the label _carefully_.”

They obeyed while Lifeline went down to Duke’s elbow, opposite from Roadblock. He pressed two fingers into the crook of his arm and rubbed, feeling for a vein. “Duty, up at his head, hold down his shoulders.”

Roadblock’s cousin obeyed, exchanging with him a grim look as they switched positions.

Duke was panting fiercely, the black tube sticking out from his mouth and creating a bulge on his neck near his Adam’s apple. He was still wheezing. The cannula had come out of his nose again. Roadblock replaced it gently and touched his forehead, trying to will a transfer of calm through the contact.

Ripcord came back to the table holding a small glass vial of clear liquid. Lifeline took it and read it before turning it upside down and inserting the tip of a syringe into the rubber stopper, drawing out the medicine.

“Hold him,” he said to Roadblock. Then he wiped the crook of Duke’s arm with a cotton ball that he’d sterilized with alcohol and inserted the needle.

Duke arched his back, making a noise around the bronchoscope while the others chanted soothing things to him. It only took a few seconds for the medicine to take effect. His eyelids drooped and all fight went out of him. The other Joes fell away from him like they were burned, startled by the sudden limpness to his body.

“It’s fine,” said Lifeline. “It’s just an anti-psychotic. It’ll keep him down for an hour, I didn’t give him much. Roadblock, stay here with me just in case. I need a few extra arms.”

Roadblock obeyed, trying not to think of Duke as a dead body rather than just asleep. He looked too quiet, so different from the struggling mass of muscles and training that he’d been moments before.

Lady Jaye came into the room, holding her Joe radio. “They’re sending a rescue huey to take them back to the Pit,” she said to the room where members of her unit were gathered in silent, nervous vigil for one of their own. “Zarana and the others who got away had vehicles in a garage that we missed in the sweep. The private soldiers who we got are waiting for local police.”

The private soldiers they’d “got” who were still alive, she meant. The ones who weren’t were also with their comrades, but waiting for transport of a different variety. Ripcord had only killed two in his Viper skin, but Flint and his team had been a bit more ruthless, and the operating room still had a stink of burning flesh.

Lifeline was the only one who had seemed to ignore this update. He was standing over Duke’s head again, his face set in a steady determination, using the tube to fill the second lung with saline, literally drowning it. Roadblock wanted to sit down. He wanted a sandwich. He wanted to sleep.

Scarlett was back with Snake Eyes. Ripcord was back with Tunnel Rat. They could only wait and whisper.

Roadblock was watching the EKG machine, soothed somehow by the steady valleys and mountains of Duke’s heartbeat. He kept the same pace in his head. _Beep. Beep. Beep._

He almost missed it. The beep that was supposed to come took a millisecond too long. Then the next one. Then a full half-second. Then there was agonizing silence that lasted over two of his own heartbeats. “Lifeline,” he said.

The medic’s head snapped up. His face went pale. “All hands NOW!” he shouted.

Roadblock stumbled backwards from this reaction, then came forward again as the rest of the Joes jostled close, panicked like sheep with wolves lurking in their pasture.

Lifeline was ordering them, but he was hand-holding, over-explaining things that should have been second nature to his medical crew. The rest of them were unused to this kind of action. They were soldiers in combat, in tactical operations, not working on saving the life of another soldier. Sure, they had all been around blood and injury, but none of them knew how to operate a medical-grade defibrillator or how to read the electrocardiogram other than the fact that Duke’s heart was not beating nearly as much as it should have been.

When the line that had before been mountains and valleys went flat as the American plains, everybody began to shout over each other.

Roadblock went to his sergeant and began the only thing he knew, lacing one hand over the other and pumping it down hard into his chest on a rhythm that, cruelly, went to the same beat as “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees.

Pump pump pump pump stayin’ alive stayin’ alive pump pump pump pump stayin’ alive stayin' alive


	8. Chapter 8

The Original Six of the G.I. Joes lay in an ordered line down the length of the medical ward, all occupying their own bed. The three that had been dosed with the allergy spores were confined to their beds, stuck there for half a week at least. The three that had been shocked had been treated and told to stay in their beds until the morning. All six were antsy and grumbling, but at least they had the company of their fellow Joes.

Complete with drama.

“You get up and get it if you want it so bad.”

“That’s so funny I forgot to laugh. You might remember that I’m _on bed rest for suffocating to death_.”

“You didn’t even come close to dying. If anyone, Duke can use that excuse, but not you, Miss Prissy.”

“Leave me out of it,” grumbled Duke, on the farthest end opposite Tunnel Rat. He’d been listening to them gripe for hours and wondered who the hell’s idea it had been to put Ripcord and Tunnel Rat in beds next to each other, sharing a television with only one remote.

“You can use those legs of yours, I didn’t see you paralyzed from the neck down.”

“That lasted minutes. Me suffocating lasted, hm, oh I don’t know, _hours_?!”

Scarlett was between Duke and Snake Eyes, reading a file from a manila folder that a runner had brought to her from the ops room on the floor above them. She was concentrating, but little lines were forming in her forehead, and it wouldn’t be long until she court martialed someone. Roadblock simply waited until Ripcord held the remote up in the air, taunting Tunnel Rat, and snatched it away from him across the short distance between the beds.

There were two similar screeches of indignation just as Doc walked in, clad in a short white medical coat above khaki scrubs. He was holding a clipboard, from which he was reading with an inscrutable smile.

“Well, Joes,” he said, making them all look up with eager anticipation of being set free early. “You’re all doing fine.”

Their faces fell. They knew that. They felt fine. They wanted to get the hell out of the med ward.

“Scarlett and Roadblock’s burns are healing nicely, as are the lacerations you two and Ripcord received from the fight. Snake Eyes is as pristine as ever, since you suffered the least amount from the asthma. Tunnel Rat and Duke’s oxygen levels are steady and holding, and other than some soreness, you should have no lasting effects beyond needing to take it easy for a while. And that was directed to all of you.” Doc appraised them with a stern but fatherly expression with his eyebrows high.

The six fell back into their pillows, sighing and grouchy, but they all felt the well-worn tinge of relief that they’d all made it out alive. This had been a tough mission, and they were very grateful that they were back at the Pit safe and sound, regardless if they were in the medical ward or not.

“Just get some rest,” Doc said. “Yesterday was a tough mission, and the rest of the unit wants to see you guys on your feet ASAP.”

He left them alone. Ripcord and Tunnel Rat immediately fell into each other as soon as the door slid shut with a whisper of air. Roadblock silenced them by switching the television to a national news channel, holding the remote in his fist beneath his thigh, far from where Rip could possibly reach it even with his Viper powers.

“-coming out of Lyman, Wyoming, we have a breaking story,” recited the newscaster, a handsome brunette woman with smoky eyes. “Cobra, the defunct multi-national corporation which recently declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy after several corruption and poor business practice scandals, came under fire again today.”

All six Original Joes, even Snake Eyes under his visor and mask, looked up and listened.

“Although the company has been issued a cease-and-desist for its pharmaceutical productions, a plant in southwestern Wyoming was reportedly back in business this past week. The US government and the US Army have both ended its long-time partnership with Cobra, terminating several weapons contracts and other deals that crippled the company’s ability to stay in the green. Fiscal quarter reports for the company have shown a steady loss since the Springfield Five, five soldiers working for the Army, were absolved of the murder and property destruction that plagued several of Cobra’s offices early this year. The attempt to start up again at this particular plant can easily be seen as an attempt by Cobra’s board members to try and regain some of the prestige it has lost. However, only days after several employees for the company invaded the town and began to cause disturbances, the plant has been shut down again after mild military action. Investigations found several mysterious substances within the laboratories inside that could potentially pose serious harm to the citizens of the surrounding city of two thousand people, and all property has been taken into custody. An unknown spokesperson for the company, identifying herself only as ‘Zarana’, emailed a comment to this station about the shut down.”

The picture on the screen switched from the news studio to a black screen with a sound wave reverberating to the lilt of Zarana’s crazed, panting voice, obviously recorded over a phone.

“-Will destroy them, you’ll see soon enough! Cobra will rise again! Cobra will triumph! We’ll be the best you’ve ever seen!”

The screen switched back to the calm-faced newscaster, who smoothed her thin stack of papers on the desk in front of her and continued. “In light of the potential harm Cobra may be doing in its attempt to regain legitimacy, the government asks that anyone with information about the company’s operations, or knowledge of further plants or buildings being used, to call the number on the screen.” She waited a threebeat, then said, “Another top story for tonight, the prime minister of-.”

Roadblock switched off the television and looked sideways, back and forth, meeting the gazes of his teammates.

They stayed quiet for one moment while their emotions bubbled, then they all began to catcall. The fight against Cobra sure wasn’t done, but at least they had their work cut out for them. They weren’t afraid of Cobra, not really. G.I. Joe would always be around to stop them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Thanks for sticking with the story, and I hope you enjoyed it! If so, please consider buying a copy of it here at Amazon: (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M047QXS). I've published it through the Kindle Worlds platform that allows legal fanfiction for a few select universes. If you really liked my story, please consider supporting me and my continued stories within the G.I. Joe: Renegades universe!


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